


Second Languages

by Tallulah



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Backstory, Childhood Memories, Divorce, Gen, Languages and Linguistics, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 08:39:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17261060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tallulah/pseuds/Tallulah
Summary: Rester, Hal and Gevanni all learnt Japanese in different ways. All of them lost, too.





	1. Rester (Listening)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 12daysChristmas on LiveJournal, prompt "Seven secret messages". The SPK's backstories were thought up by still_lycoris.

Anthony met Cassie while they were both working in Japan. He was over there as part of a case, investigating a globally-active drug cartel of interest to both the FBI and the Japanese police. She was on secondment in her firm’s Tokyo office. Both of them were out drinking in Roppongi and their eyes met across a crowded room. 

Both of them were working with English-speaking colleagues, but both were trying to pick up some Japanese, to make it easier, say, to go to the store, or ask for help from your landlord. Anthony had learnt a bunch of phrases which he could mimic like a parrot that got him the results he needed or got Japanese people smiling at him and looking like they thought he had good manners. Of course they never looked surprised when he lapsed back into English. It bugged him, it being so obvious to everyone that he clearly knew nothing. Cassie said she’d liked studying languages back in school and she missed it, so she was doing it in her spare time. In the early days they had cute conversations in terrible Japanese. They made a point of finding the most kitsch, Japanese-cliche couple things to do together, and getting people to take pictures of them at all the cheesiest tourist spots, enjoying the romance and laughing at it at the same time. 

They got married in Japan – a small ceremony, a few people from work there, her in a white suit dress she’d had to get sent over from America because she said nothing in the stores here would fit. Getting married felt right, at the time. Or at least it felt like something else he was learning, something that he could see he was going to take to, and was happy to put the time in for.

It got so he knew quite a lot of Japanese to speak, and sometimes on the right day with his ear tuned in he could understand people’s responses even if they weren’t speaking slowly for the foreigner. When it came to reading, though, he was like a six-year-old, painstakingly deciphering each word, unable to remember how you read this or that character in this or that context. Cassie said she was surprised he’d got that far seeing how context-specific Japanese culture was. She said, _you’re always the same. No matter what the job is, you bring the same old same old to it. I mean, why change a winning formula, right?_ He thought that was a joke, at the time. 

She was pregnant when her secondment ended and she went back to the US. He said he’d follow when the case was wrapped up, which it was looking like it was going to be. Turned out to take a few months longer than estimated. He probably should’ve pushed to be moved off it, gone home, been with his wife as she went into labour with their first child. But it didn’t occur to him. 

People said that Japanese is all about what you don’t say, the secret messages implied by the silence or the sentences trailing off. He never really got what they meant.

Back in America, the Japanese skills melted away like butter in a hot saucepan. He didn’t mind, exactly. The time working there had put him on to various films and books and poetry, but he wasn’t good enough to consume them without translations, and it was getting to the point when improving even a little was taking more and more effort. Plus he wasn’t intending to go back. Cassie had given up on it months before, while she’d still been in Japan. _I had more important stuff to worry about,_ she said, but she didn’t say what.

They split up when his daughter was six. He can’t say he hadn’t seen it coming. He’d fallen behind on whatever it was she’d been hoping he’d figure out, he hadn’t put the time in, and then his pride wouldn’t let him admit it, wouldn’t let him try and start from scratch. Work was busy. Work was always busy. It was easier to stick with what he knew.

It was some years later when they put out the call for someone to head up the Special Provision for Kira and mentioned knowledge of Japanese might come in useful. He was always going to go for it – saying _I can’t, I’ve got a family_ (like many people were, by then) felt like he was pretending a connection that wasn’t there, kidding himself he hadn’t screwed it up. Of course Cassie was furious with him even so. He could hardly say to her it was an attempt to start making amends, to learn how to learn from scratch again – Kira and how he killed were outside of anyone’s experience, and his Japanese was, to put it mildly, rusty. He figured if he came back alive, maybe he’d be able to move forward, at least a bit.


	2. Hal (Speaking)

Halle studied Japanese in high school. She was out of other electives she cared about, and it sounded kind of interesting, and her best friend Cathy really wanted to. “Come on,” she begged Halle. “Imagine being able to say like, _oh, I speak Japanese. Yeah, I’m just that smart._ Do that and your ice queen face and you’ll blow everyone’s minds at college.” Halle did the ice queen face at her then, but it wasn’t like she had another option she wanted to fight for and so they ended up in the class together, memorising hiragana and renting weird subtitled movies _for practice_. Of course they couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue being spoken, but they’d always both got a bit of a kick out of being too cool for the same things as everyone else. You could get away with that when you were pretty and smart and able to do the ice queen face. Cathy only had the first two of those but she and Halle got each other’s sense of humour, and when you know someone else is going to find the joke funny, it gives you more confidence.

As it happened, they both took to Japanese right away. Probably helped they practiced the sentences on each other. Over the phone to bug Cathy’s little brother, who was sure they were talking about him; passing notes in class; looking up the vocab to imitate the most over-dramatic bits in the weird movies. Cathy was already her best friend, and this was in senior year, they’d already survived a lot of high school drama together, so it wasn’t like their friendship needed boosting, but the Japanese did that anyway. “Ugh, we are such dorks,” Cathy said, after they’d spent an afternoon making kanji flashcards together. Halle put her nose in the air and said, “Speak for yourself,” and Cathy flipped her the bird. And then they both ended up majoring in Japanese at college – different states, but there were still the phone calls when they could afford it, and meeting up every vacation, and, as time went on, being able to talk in Japanese about stuff they would have chosen to talk about anyway, rather than just, _I like…_ , _Yesterday, I went to…_ , _The weather is…_

Halle joined the FBI for a number of reasons. Cathy screamed down the phone when she heard the news and demanded to know why her best friend was so cool. 

“Excuse me, who’s living the dream here, Ms. Japanese Salarywoman? How many promotions did you get this year?” Cathy had moved to Japan after graduation and by now she was very, very good at speaking Japanese. She was also very good at corporate finance. Halle was going to go out and stay with her when she could get the time away from work. They’d do all the Tokyo tourist things. Halle would get to practise her Japanese properly, step it up a level from books and films and language exchange meetings. “Japanese only til seven p.m. every night,” Cathy said. “I’m warning you.” She didn’t talk about work much, and even if she had, Halle probably wouldn’t have remembered or cared that the Yotsuba Group was one of that company’s biggest competitors. She probably wouldn’t have thought of her best friend from high school, someone who in her mind was associated with unfortunate make-up choices and making fun of the lunch menu, as a key part of a company’s executive board. She definitely wouldn’t have thought of Cathy as someone that anyone would want to kill in order to boost their own profits. Coming to Japan now, she tries not to remember which are the places Cathy said they’d visit. She focuses on sharpening her speaking skills. She’ll need every advantage she can get against Kira, and using the words Cathy helped her learn will only make her victory sweeter.


	3. Gevanni (Memorising)

Dad’s job took him all round the world, so Stephen grew up with toys no one else had and a father who was around all the time for a few weeks and then a voice on the phone for a few months. But the job in Japan was different, it’d be three years, so he and Mum and Louise followed Dad there. Stephen was seven or something. He understood what was going on, but he didn’t quite understand they spoke a whole other language over there. Particularly not a whole other language with an entirely different alphabet. (It took him a long time to get his head round the idea of it being _three_ different alphabets, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

He doesn’t remember being unhappy about it. Louise was, he knows that – though in his memories, it’s not _unhappy_ , it’s _always getting mad with me for no reason_. She told him, long after they were back home, that the other kids in her class had been picking on her for the whole time she was there. Stephen didn’t have that. Sure, he can remember them all staring at him, and some of them coming up to him to study his eyes and argue about what colour they were (he just said, _my mom says they’re blue_ , and then crossed them if people kept staring). But mostly people just left him alone, or chatted to him a bit if they happened to be sitting next to each other, and if sometimes they did decide they weren’t going to talk to him because he was a foreigner, or say things like _I heard all Americans smell, I heard they’re all fat_ , then he just let them get on with it. Louise sometimes said stuff to get a rise out of him, but he was already pretty good at pretending he didn’t care, to make her mad instead. So he just did thaty.

Of course he probably didn’t say it – _my mom says they’re blue_ – just like that. His mom bought some tapes before they left America, they all three studied together, had them playing in the car. Stephen thought it was fun, he liked knowing stuff. Mom bought him a notebook, told him it was a special notebook where he could write down all the new Japanese words he learnt. Louise called him a dork. It seemed to him like she didn’t like learning Japanese, she thought it was stupid, but, much later, she told him they all used to laugh at her accent if she did say anything, or tell her she was using the wrong words even if she wasn’t, or trick her into saying something embarrassing. It makes sense your language skills wouldn’t exactly thrive under those circumstances. Mom was never hugely confident in it either, but at least in the shops and stuff if she used any Japanese at all they’d say how good she was, and nobody picked on her.

There are still a few things he never learnt in school because they were being covered while he could barely understand what anyone said to him. And a decent chunk of American history he’s less solid on than he should be because it’s fourth-grade stuff, taught when he was out of the country learning how to write kanji instead. But it started to be he knew Japanese words, or could understand them, without remembering how he knew. Way more words than he ever wrote down in the notebook. And he had friends who complained about how it wasn’t fair he already knew English, who thought it was cool that he could kind of talk two languages. He told them how to say rude things in English and they all got a kick out of saying things other people couldn’t understand.

Plus there was always a lot to look at, in Japan. Always another batch of picture-letter-words, or a smiley cartoon character, or things that he’d never seen back home: paper cranes draped over a memorial, white lightning bolts tied to trees. 

_I guess I’d probably like it now,_ Louise said. _If I went back. If I knew I could leave when I wanted to. But I wasn’t really in the mood to appreciate cultural differences then, you know?_

_We should do a trip sometime_ , he said to her. _You can make your peace with it and I can show off my language skills and you can call me a dork. You’ll love it._

That was much later, but it was still long before she got married, before she told Stephen what the guy was doing to her, before he died and she was sent to prison, before Kira killed her. Stephen’s been back to Japan a bunch of times on vacation, but he never did get to go with her. She said, the last time he visited her, _Be weird, wouldn’t it? If Kira did – did get me. I mean, with him probably being Japanese and everything. You could’ve met him sometime and never even known it._ Stephen still thinks of that as he shadows Mikami through the streets of Kyoto, staying unnoticed, speaking Japanese words he forgot he knew. Mentally raises a glass to his younger self and his skills at watching and listening and taking stuff in. No one makes fun of him for speaking Japanese. He thinks he may not come back here again, after this case is done.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 12daysChristmas, prompt "Seven secret messages". The SPK's backstories were thought up by still_lycoris.


End file.
